Narrative tenses worksheets
24 worksheets and 6 shadowing scripts · Tenses
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Narrative tenses worksheets
24 printable worksheets with answer keys.
Narrative tenses shadowing
Listen, repeat, record and compare: short scripts for pronunciation and fluency.
About Narrative tenses
Narrative tenses are the past forms we combine to tell stories: the past simple for the main events, the past continuous for background and interrupted actions, the past perfect for earlier events, and the past perfect continuous for longer activities leading up to a past moment. I was walking to work when I realized I had left my phone at home.
They are usually brought together at B1–B2 and refined at C1–C2 through anecdotes, storytelling and exam writing. The main challenge is choosing the right form in context: learners retell whole stories in the past simple, overuse the past perfect, or drift between present and past.
This page features printable narrative tenses worksheets with answer keys, which can be printed as PDFs or solved online via a class link.
Teaching tips: Narrative tenses
- Give learners a bare past simple story and ask them to enrich it with background (past continuous) and flashbacks (past perfect).
- Use a picture sequence with one image out of order, so learners need the past perfect to explain it.
- Draw one timeline for a whole anecdote and let learners label each event with its tense.
- Watch for tense drift, where writers slip into the present in the middle of a past narrative; ask them to underline every verb in their draft.
- Pair narrative tenses with time linkers such as as soon as, by the time, while and just as.
Questions teachers ask
Which tenses count as narrative tenses?
Usually the past simple, past continuous, past perfect simple and past perfect continuous. Some courses also include used to and would for past habits in stories.
How can I make narrative tenses practice less mechanical?
Use personal anecdotes, urban legends or story chains in which each learner adds a sentence in a given tense, so accuracy is practiced through real storytelling.
Is it wrong to tell a story in the present tense?
No. The historic present is common in jokes and informal anecdotes (So this man walks into a shop…), but learners should keep one time frame consistently.